Find Your Adventure

Laurence Gonzales

November 17, 2009

Most backcountry searches don’t cost the victim a dime. Let’s keep it that way.
On April 25, 2009, Scott Mason set out to hike the Presidential Range in New Hampshire on a popular, 17-mile route that crosses several peaks, including Mount Washington. Mason had decided to do it in one day. With his training and experience (he’s an Eagle Scout), it wasn’t an unreasonable plan. But then the 17-year-old turned his ankle. At first, Mason continued hiking
his original route. Then he tried to find a shorter trail off the mountain but was stopped by a stream swollen with spring runoff. The weather was good, and he was fairly well equipped, so he wasn’t in any immediate danger. He had food and was able to make a fire. A search was mounted for Mason when he didn’t return as soon as planned. Things got complicated fast, and before long the operation involved the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, Mountain Rescue Service, Androscoggin Valley Search and Rescue, the Appalachian Mountain Club, and a Maine Forest Service helicopter.

No one knows exactly when humans first mastered fire, but there’s evidence that it was more than a million years ago. In the 1960s the paleoanthropologist F. Clark Howell found fossils in Ethiopia that tell a remarkable story: Bands of early humans organized complex hunts, setting well-coordinated fires on the grass plains to drive herds of elephants into swamps, where the mired animals were slaughtered, butchered, and carried away. The strategy of combining fire and mud is a stroke of genius as dazzling as any modern technological breakthrough. Recent evidence also suggests that about 72,000 years ago, people were heat-treating stones with fire to make better tools and weapons. So it’s no wonder we love fire. It’s been with us a long time—perhaps longer than language.

Flying is a daring undertaking: Whether you realize it or not, you’re putting yourself in a Coke can full of explosive fuel going nearly three-quarters the speed of sound. When things go wrong—as several recent incidents have shown—they tend to go wrong rapidly and catastrophically.

Sometimes, there is nothing you can do about it. A Continental Airlines commuter plane, operating as Colgan Air Flight 3407, took off from Newark, New Jersey, bound for Buffalo Niagara on February 12, 2009. It had almost made it to the airport when it pitched up sharply, then pitched down violently, rolled left, and spun right, crashing into a home and exploding in a fireball. Everyone on board was killed, along with a man in the house. No matter what your strategy for survival might have been, it would not have worked under those conditions.

But most airline accidents are survivable, and what we do in an emergency
can influence whether we come out alive.

If she had lived, Anne Frank would have turned 80 this June. Hers was an extraordinary act of survival, in which the process of living was far more important than the outcome. Her Diary of a Young Girl, published after her death, reminds us that in some cases survival is not simply a matter of how long you live, but how well you live.

Frank’s birthday is a good time to contemplate what it means, really, to survive.
The word is derived from the Latin supervivere, a combination of super (over) and vivere (to live). While the common translation of supervivere is “to outlive,” Frank’s diary suggests that supervivere means something infinitely richer. Her story describes survival as an act of grace under pressure—super-living, you could call it.

April 21, 2009

Occasionally, I Iike to visit some place where the objective hazards appear so great that I can remind myself what paying attention really means. The way we behave in environments full of risk is pretty different from how we act in the safety of our world at home. For example, I once went out to an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and found what looked like the most hazardous environment I’d ever seen.

I traveled by boat from Galveston, Texas, leaving in the middle of the night and arriving at the base of the rig in the morning for the change of crew. A crane lowered something to us that looked like an oversize orange life ring, with rope webbed above it like a tent. I stood on the ring with several crew members, grabbed the rope, and was pulled 20 stories into the air and set down in the midst of the whirling, roaring machinery. The ride up there scared me half to death, but the business end of the oil rig was even worse.

February 06, 2009

Lucy had a small brain, tiny bones, and wasn’t even four feet tall. But Lucy, the australopith, was a survivor.

Many years ago, I read of a discovery that set my mind on fire. An American paleoanthropologist named Donald Johanson had discovered the bones of a woman who lived almost 3.2 million years ago, making her our earliest known ancestor. The scientific community was equally excited by the find because it proved that people walked upright long before they evolved the large brains characteristic of modern humans. This was a big deal because the most famous researchers of human evolution, Louis and Mary Leakey, believed that we had developed our modern brains before we walked upright. But Lucy, as the new fossil was named, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the opposite was true.

I was certainly interested in our evolution for purely intellectual reasons, but to me a more intriguing question was how Lucy and her kind (Australopithecus afarensis) had survived. Lucy shared her terrain with hyenas, false sabertooths, and scimitar cats—just a few of the creatures that might have meant her harm. And predators weren’t the only hazard.

In May 1978, almost four years after Johanson discovered Lucy, some of Mary Leakey’s grad students made one of the most remarkable discoveries in history: a trail of footprints created by another group of australopiths at a place called Laetoli, in Tanzania, nearly 3.6 million years ago. Continue reading this article >>

February 04, 2009

After deploying the parachute on the first skydive of his life, Danie Pharr, 25, realized that the instructor strapped to his back, George "Chip" Steele, 49, was strangely silent, MSNBC reports. Realizing that Steele was in no condition to get the two to the ground, Pharr took control of the parachute and piloted himself and his instructor to safety, drawing on skills he learned in the United States Army and a bit of know-how picked up from watching television. Once on solid ground, Barr was unable to revive the unconscious Steele, who died of an apparent heart attack.

I think it's significant that Pharr had had military training—always a good thing to have in your back pocket. But I also think it's important to note the way he framed his situation. He said: "So at that point I realized I was just going to have to do what I had to do to get down to the ground and try to help him." He was trying to survive for someone else, not just to save himself. The best survivors always frame their predicament that way: How can I help someone else? That's true even if you're alone. The famous French aviator, Antoine St.- Exupery was stranded in the desert facing almost certain death, and he had the thought that he had to survive for the sake of his wife. He was worried that his death would be too much for her to take. Needless to say, the Frenchman made it home to her.

I first began to write about airline crashes in the early seventies. Ever since then, I've tried to learn about and write about both the joys of aviation and the business of avoiding airplane crashes--or else surviving them when they happen.

As I write this, the crash of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 into New York City’s Hudson River happened just about three hours ago, and this is my first response to it. As a pilot and a journalist who writes about aviation, I know from long experience that it's much too early to be weaving detailed explanations of what happened. No one knows yet. It takes time to gather the facts, interview those involved, and examine the wreckage.

The system of airlines works so well that it sometimes seems miraculous to me that we can move so many people around the world, day and night, and have so few accidents. It's an extremely complex system, designed for safety as well as making money. And as a result, something as complex as the crash of an airliner takes a long time to unravel. Be patient. Don’t jump to conclusions.

But we think we know a couple of things at this early point in the investigation. It seems that a big airliner, an Airbus A-320, with 155 people on board, made a water landing in the Hudson River and everyone made it out alive. That is an astounding event. If you had asked me what probability I would assign to such an event (i.e., everybody lives), I might have said 50 percent if I had been feeling good. Landing any airplane in the water, other than a seaplane, is a very bad idea. There are 100 ways to screw up, and if you can think of 50 of them, you're a genius--and most of us pilots aren't geniuses.

For example, with a fragile structure like an airliner, the wings could have come off, and the plane could have burst into flames. You have to keep the nose very high while landing on water so that the tail and underbelly will slow the rest of the plane down, and then the body and nose come to rest gently (you hope) into the water. Water is not compressible, and hitting it at a high speed (the plane was probably going 150 miles an hour) is like hitting concrete. The pilots kept the plane intact. So we have to congratulate them on knocking that one out of the park. An oil and diesel fuel fire on the water during that evacuation would have given the news tonight a very different tone. Mayor Blumberg would not have been calling it "Miracle on The Hudson."

On January 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90, a Boeing 737, took off from Washington National (now Reagan) Airport, skipped off the 14th Street Bridge, and crashed into the Potomac River less than a mile from the airport. The plane broke up and sank quickly. There were 79 people on board and only five of them survived. When the plane hit the bridge, it also killed four people in their cars. So we have to be thankful that the pilots from US Airways knew what they were doing.

We also have to acknowledge at this point that the passengers, presumably led by the flight crew, appear to have kept their heads. I have heard that there was at least one baby on board. That makes this achievement that much more remarkable. In crash landings, babies are easy to lose. I'm relieved to hear that this one made it out safely.

One passenger, named Jeff Kolodjay, told a BBC reporter, "I just kept saying relax relax, women and children first. And then it just started filling with water, quick." This suggests the kind of thinking--and emotion--that I talk about in my books and in my column: Perceive and believe. Don't engage in denial. And stay calm. Don't panic. If you're going to die, you're going to die. Suck it up. In a truly dire situation like this, you have to let go of thoughts of your own death and simply do what needs to be done: Act deliberately and in the right direction.

I reviewed the early photos and video that were coming in just after the crash. I always wondered about those yellow life vests. Luckily, they were actually under the seats on that plane. (They're not on every flight. I always feel under my seat before takeoff so that I know if I'm going to have to swim or not.) But most passengers appeared to be wearing them, which suggests a very good general level of calm and functionality among that group of survivors. Bravo to them.

As information becomes available, I'll be discussing this accident more in the coming days and weeks. It's one of the more remarkable accidents in aviation history, not because the plane crashed, but because no one died.

January 06, 2009

When we hear the word “panic,” most of us imagine someone running around and screaming. But panic takes many forms. It can be thought of simply as any behavior that occurs when the level of stress or emotion is high enough to prevent conscious thought and deliberate decision-making.

For example, most people panic when they fall or when they’re knocked down. The panic may be brief and not very intense, such as when you slip on ice and scramble to get back up. But it can also be incredibly powerful. In the summer of 2000, a 35-year-old climber in Alberta grabbed a loose hold while soloing the southwest face of Mount Colin and fell more than 200 feet, hitting solid rock at the bottom. He died from extensive trauma, but even in his panicked state he was still trying to get back up.

In emergencies, such a powerful natural response can seem nearly impossible to suppress. On June 26, 1996, a 44-year-old man fell from a raft into the upper Hudson River near North Creek, New York. Despite being warned against doing so, he quickly tried to stand up. His foot was immediately caught between two rocks. Although the water was fairly shallow, the current pushed his upper body down and held him under. It stripped off his life vest, and he drowned. Foot entrapment is a common cause of death on rivers, because when boaters fall into the water, their momentary panic overrides the ability to think logically, and they forget what they’ve been told: Don’t stand up.

It may seem like panic is all about the mind, but panic is really about the body—or, more precisely, how you’re reacting to what the body is experiencing.

October 28, 2008

There are certain foods and drinks that most people would consider empty calories, such as sodas and many kinds of snacks. When we eat or drink them, we feel nourished, when in reality we’re still lacking the ingredients needed to sustain a healthy organism. Many forms of information are like empty calories—a lot of the news we receive, for example. The mind works at taking in facts and comprehending events. It feels like we’re learning, but the ingredients of deep knowledge are missing.